Pause for thought

One of my uncles died a few nights ago.

He was my mother’s brother, estranged, and someone with whom I had no connection, having met him only once when I was very young. It’s fair to say my mother didn’t have a huge relationship with him either – much of that side of the family are that peculiar and uniquely Irish manner of estranged, a condition borne of fractured, secretive conversations, generation gaps, parental divide and the deafening silence of too little said in too many years.

I tend to blame the Church and its powerful meddling influence on Irish life in the 50s (and after that period too) for this ‘oddness’ that we, as a nation, are so used to. It’s to blame for creating a large number of emotionally stunted, bullied, oppressed, tragic people, many of whom went on to be wonderful husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, but many of whom also went on to be bastards and beasts of the foulest kind. But the Church is not solely responsible and, for whatever reasons, some people just end up…well…odd.

Whatever the circumstances, my mother has lost a brother and that gives pause for thought.

Alien vs Predator

It’s odd to come home and find everything exactly the way it was when I left.

The other half has been gone to the US since Sunday and so I have a 3-bedroom house all to myself for a few weeks. This leads to all sorts of problems, of course, but there are advantages.

Looking after the dog, by myself, is a distinct problem. He’s needy. I am too, but there’s not much he can do to appease me, if I’m honest. The neighbours, who are there all day, come and take him every so often, but in the evenings it’s a face-off.

“Dinner”, his eyes say. “Give me your dinner”

“I bloody fed you 2 minutes ago”, I snap.

“That wasn’t enough. I want more. I especially want that curry you are eating, not that stale Ryvita you just threw on the floor to try and distract me”, his eyes say.

“Jesus, I’m only in the door half an hour – let me relax”, I plead (yes, with the dog).

“Oh ho. Relax is it? ENTERTAIN ME”, his eyes say.

This can go on for hours.

If it ain’t broke, then BREAK it and record a 7″ single, bitch

If the whole no-fi/lo-fi thing is a bit too ‘P4k‘ for you then look away now. I’m a big fan. All the bad recording, tinny sound, hard-to-decipher vocals and homemade t-shirts/album covers/everything makes me feel like I’m back in school listening to Bleach again.
There seems to be very few bands from the Captured Tracks/ Slumberland/ Fat Possum stables that are shit these days. Every second week, there’s some lo-fi gem on tour in Europe and, more often than not, Foggy Notions or Skinny Wolves get them upstairs in Whelan’s where they put on brief, wonderful shows and then sell their own t-shirts.We get this with our local bands so it’s great to get it from bands you may only have ever read about on myspace.

As contrived/trendy/uninteresting as some may decry this lo-fi scene as, I love being in a small venue with the band close enough to touch and having them stand beside you in the crowd to check out the support. I love the noisy melodies. I love the brevity. I love the ramshackle performances and the fact that many of them have never been to Europe before. I love the drums.

There’s a rawness to bands like Vivian Girls/Wavves/Times New Viking/Real Estate et al that remains undiluted by hype and combines the nostalgic chill of twee with the pelvic snarl of teenage.

It’s fast, fun and plentiful.

What’s to snipe at? Nowt, that’s what.

Curmudgeons begone.

So now, say hello to Grass Widow, made up of Lillian, Raven and Hannah. They bring you harmonies and fuzz.
Born from the remnants of Shitstorm (the band indie-chick du jour Frankie Rose left to join Vivian Girls, whom she subsequently left to join Crystal Stilts, whom she has now ditched to form Frankie and the Outs…), Grass Widow have a self-titled 12″ LP and a 12″ EP knocking around at the moment.
Have a peep at Captured Tracks for the EP and Make A Mess for the LP.
Here they are covering Black Hole by The Urinals, a major influence in the lo-fi scene.

Grass Widow – Black Hole

And here’s one from their self-titled album.

Grass Widow – To Where

A gentle reintroduction through the medium of summat new…

If there’s a blogeur equivalent of ‘doing a Pink at the VMAs’ and metaphorically dangling myself upside down from a buff acrobat, banging away on the keys of a keyboard thing to impress you, the agog reader, then this is it.

Shiny and new like the Ceann Comhairle’s expensed, and expensive,  Pringle jocks (no little holeage in the front to pee out of for FULL support and maximum expense…haven’t you ever had a pair?) this is There Will Be Blog 2.0…for the moment anyway.

I’m not sure what the advantages to the switch might be but I fancy a change and if it does go tits up I’ll scurry back over to Blogger like a crab seeking a latrine after a hot curry. I am reliably informed that ‘WordPress is better’ and ‘Blogger is balls’ by ‘culturally relevant internets people’ (I’ll stop doing that now).

I guess if I ever wanted to bag a heap of nominations for blog posts and consistency, well, I’ve blown it now.

If you are going/gone to the Jesus Lizard in the Button Factory then you are a lucky motherfucker – I just can’t stretch to it. At least they melted my face at Primavera this year and will most likely melt, or completely kick off, your face tonight. A tasty night of tunes awaits this Friday though when Nodzzz arrive in Whelans (with the wonderful So Cow in support), fuzzing up the night, and over at Twisted Pepper there’s a Richter Collective Singles night with Not Squares, Jogging and a DJ set from Jape himself. Bi-location will be a necessity.

Me? I’m trying to settle into a working week that now consists of four days and a smaller paypacket so the recession has landed home at last. The dog even bit me the other day. He must have felt I wasn’t quite bummed-out enough. It felt like the equivalent of your girlfriend inadvertently insulting you in front of your mates. It just wasn’t expected. Luckily he’s a Shih Tzu so my lengthy recovery took about 5 minutes of looking at my ‘wound’  and looking at him and looking at it and looking around the room. Thanks Chirpa. Thanks for hurting our friendship with your gnashers.

Anyway, the laptop’s back so it’s time to catch up on all things music, film, TV, blog and otherwise.

Easy like eggs on a Sunday morning

I awoke early on Sunday morning to an empty right-side of the bed and the thumping of little hairy feet on the stairs.
It appears that the newly-installed Playstation 3 has taken my other half from me and has worn her out so much with its relentless gaming-power that she has passed out on the couch from exhaustion.
This must be how it feels to be a human in the future of the Terminator franchise – helpless before the power of the machines.
The dog doesn’t really give a shit about the complex mechanics of our human relationship – or how a computer gaming console can come between people so rapidly – so he proceeds with his usual game of ’staring in your face like an idiot’.
I continuously inform him of the futility of this contest and how there’ll never be a clear winner….he just keeps staring, throwing in the old ‘cock the head sideways’ routine every minute or so.
Sigh.
We’ve been living in Ballsbridge for 4 or 5 months now and I’ve grown to really like it, after my initial scepticism.
Yes, there are hordes of rugger-loving, Crok-sporting, nice-but-dim D4 posho types around but the pub up the road is a cracker, the neighbours are lovely and it’s really nice to be in a leafy suburb ten minutes from town.
Somehow though, I had, up until now, not made it here for breakfast (NOT brunch, NEVER brunch) in all these months.
Sinead (I’ll link to her myspace as she recently informed me she intends to begin myspace blogging again soon) has been to this Juniors place a few times, a trip of about 1 minute from our front door, and has come back espousing the delights of the finely cooked food and ‘Galway-esque’, i.e. cramped, design.
But those times have been with her friends and I don’t want to crash her girl time. y’know?
That said, last time she went down with a friend of hers, some drunken young men bought them both Mimosas and then sought deep and meaningful relationship advice so maybe I should have made the trek before now, if only in a supervisory capacity.
We sat inside, as all the outside seating was filled with the beautiful people.
I’m pretty sure I actually saw two pairs of oversized sunglasses eating breakfast at one stage.
The giant Prada ones seemed to be shoving devilled eggs into its lenses.
Weird.
I had the ‘Breakfast of Champions’, which was absolutely sublime, consisting of a giant, succulent Cumberland sausage, streaky-yet-meaty bacon, a rosti, a two-yolked fried egg, a small slice of thick toast, not-from-a-can beans made with tomatoes and proper beans, black & white pudding (something I would never normally entertain) and a massive mushroom and tomato double act, both remaining half-eaten at the end, thanks to a near-full-to-capacity belly.
Sinead opted for a New York steak (thick and charred), eggs with Hollandaise sauce and some deliciously small, roasted potato chunks.
I often judge eateries by their coffee and this coffee was delicious – fresh, frothy and strong as an ox. Even the orange juice was freshly squeezed.
As you can probably see if you have a gander at the menu, it wasn’t particularly cheap but as a treat at the weekend, it’s well worth it.
As we were paying the bill, the waitress/cashier admired Sinead’s beautiful dress and then asked me about my t-shirt.
“It’s an Animal Collective t-shirt”, I said.
“What’s that?”, she said.
“A band”
“Oh right. Well I think Irish men don’t usually make much of an effort dressing so you’re doing ok actually”
Personally I think the t-shirt is a little too ‘Ivan Lendl in the 80s’ with its purple/lime green/white combo but I like it…and so did she, apparently.
If you fancy a visit to Ballsbridge, and someone to admire your pretty ropey t-shirt, then you could do a lot worse than giving Juniors a go.

I don’t want a holiday in the suuu-un…oh no, I do actually.

Things started strangely.
As I settled into my seat (as best a 6′ 1″ manchild can ’settle’ into an airline seat), something wasn’t quite right.
A quick browse of the food and drink laminate showed sandwiches for 4 euro, bottled water for 1 euro and beer for 1.50…my eyes seemed to lack a certain burning sensation…a distinct lack of sensory-overload thanks to relentless blue-and-yellow plastic hideousness and advertisements for ‘baggies’ of vodka and rum.
“That air steward-person doesn’t look like a Transylvanian post-op transsexual”, I thought to myself. “And I can still feel my legs below the knees.”
I was on a Tunisian airline, you see, but Ryanair was etched into my mind’s eye.
We were on the way to Yasmine Hammamet, a Tunisian coastal resort in its infancy. The idea of a resort holiday brought up images of drunken 18-year old Thomas Cook reps vomiting in each other’s handbags whilst having brief, unprotected sex on the beach with swarthy Ahmed, the lifeguard/fruit salesman/salamander vendor.
Luckily I had left my handbag at home.
The girlf and I really needed a break and a holiday of poolside boozing and beach side lolling was just the ticket.
The Diar Lemdina hotel offered the perfect deal: the room was a two-storey job with 3 bathrooms and two bedrooms, all of which I used in rotation and never limiting myself to their specific function.
The pool was a long 10-second stumble from the room’s door and the period between said door and falling headfirst into the pool, when I was absolutely beerless, was a nightmare.
Luckily, there was always a drinks-delivery youth waiting in the wings to take care of me, almost in that Remains Of The Day, Anthony Hopkins way.
I was Emma Thompson and little Mohammed was my silent protector and provider without ever really admitting it to me.
The first few days were a bit of a culture shock with the haggling nature of the nearby market, the Medina – I spent a half hour negotiating the price of a magic carpet with one tradesman only to discover it was a rug with little-to-no magic capabilities.
With the Medina right next door to the hotel, we were through it every night, dodging Arabic beckoning and cries of ‘Cheaper than Asda’ or ‘Have a butchers’ but it was something for which you really needed to be in a mentally strong state to cope and if you have never experienced this kind of thing, you are hereby warned.
The routine quickly became: get up, hit the pool, have lunch, have a beer, hit the beach, have beers, go on a jet ski, avoid paying 45 Dinar for 3 pieces of fruit, avoid buying a turtle/salamander/frog, have dinner and have beers in the fading sun.
Bliss.
Then we booked a two-day Sahara trip.
My Irish skin said ‘no’ but my fingers reached for the cash anyway and on the Thursday morning at 6am, having spent 4 days living the lives of particularly complainy lizards with excellent communication skills and Dunnes flip-flops, we packed off to the desert.
It took in many aspects including a gripping 4×4 trip to the Atlas Mountains, a horse-and-cart journey to a fruit plantation in the middle of nowhere, an oasis, camel-riding in the Sahara, nearly catching the sunrise in the desert, salt-mines and the Troglodyte caves where all the Star Wars Tatooine scenes were shot.
It was truly wonderful, one of the more weird parts of the trip being the visit to a Southern Tunisian couple, in their respective 70s and 80s, who actually lived in one of the cave houses, having reared eight children there.
As I stood there in awe of their achievement in such an unforgiving environment, an English girl bulldozed into their ‘bedroom’ bellowing ‘They ain’t goh now telllllleeee’.
Least of their problems, love.
Unusually, given my hyper-cynical disposition (and considering I was a tourist on a touristy tour) I was genuinely moved by the fact that in the corner of this cave house, an ancient woman was hand-grinding corn with a stone mill, collecting a few Dinar from the browsing tourists.
The old husband just sat quietly across from her, slowly baking in the 38-degree heat in his hole-in-the-ground house and yet they seemed content, nodding and smiling at the curious horde in front of them.
I’ll never complain about my phone reception again.
It helped that our guide – a wizened prune of a man called Eddie with a hilariously crap line in jokes and a genuine affection for this part of Tunisia, where he was originally from – was a real pro, always showing us what to do, where to move, how to deal with the culturally unfamiliar aspects of the tour.
Toward the end of the 1300-kilometre round-trip he did seem to be verging on ‘mentally delicate’ but I’m sure he’s ok now. Ok or still asleep. Or dead.
He even brought bread for the hole-in-the-ground family’s donkey.
We made it back to the resort hotel after two days, drained and fulfilled, set for one more slap-up meal, a little hookah pipe, some Boukha and bed.
The next day was time to fly, just as the week had done.
I should have bought a salamander.

March of the people

Watching Werner Herzog’s South Pole documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, is an exceptionally humbling experience.
Herzog sets out his stall early in the film, telling us that he was not interested in making a movie about ‘fluffy’ penguins and instead he takes his tiny crew to McMurdo Station, the American headquarters, and a town-of-sorts in the Antarctic.
In and around this area, he encounters a group of people working in a variety of disciplines – plumber, driver, biologist, volcanologist – and tries to discover how and why they have ended up here, at the ‘bottom of the world’.
Herzog willfully seizes on the eccentricities of many of these people and manages to create a film that is beautiful, both in its visual representation of an unusual part of the planet and in its portrayal of the fragility of humanity and how, ultimately, we are all just a blip on this planet with extinction an inevitability, just like the dinosaurs before us.
Nature will take care of us sooner or later.
We are no more special than the single cell organisms that are scraped from the ocean floor by one 50s science fiction film enthusiast and scientist who celebrates the discovery of three new species in a single dive by jamming with a co-worker on top of their shed in the middle of the snow, their noisy blues echoing across the white plains.
Personally, I find this prognosis refreshing and Herzog certainly doesn’t want it to be taken as bad news. As always, he sees the beauty in human existence, in their stories and thoughts and ideas and lives and he sees the eventual demise of our species as just another step in the world’s history..and future.
Why do we deserve anything special because we are a little more intellectually advanced than most animals?
Isn’t it wonderful to imagine that everything we have ever created, both hideous and sublime, will someday be gone, probably through our own doing, and the world could be once more left to the most basic creatures, scurrying and foraging on the ocean bed, only interested in the next meal.
The earth would have a clean slate again and it is just a shame that Herzog will not be there to make a documentary about that.
I can imagine his monotonous voice, just audible over helicopter-shot footage of a desolate, silent planet:
“Theees eees de plenet nowww. Chust ez eet begenn. Wiss nossing ett all exsseptt ameebazzz and plennnt liiiiife….’

Primavera/Barcelona pics

EDIT: Check out my review over at Drop-D

Powerful stuff

Hoping it ain’t lost in the transition….

….as drop-d moves to new pastures. I usually hate reading my stuff but I actually enjoy reading this review of Mudhoney’s last album. Sorry for this somewhat self-serving post but anyway..

With the grunge era now a nostalgic bong water stain on the ripped jeans of yesterday, all we veterans can do is snaffle up Nirvana albums on vinyl if we stumble across them, watch Pearl Jam get fat and old and reminisce over Youtube footage of Alice In Chains’ mesmerising MTV Unplugged performance from back in the day.

Mark Arm and his elder statesmen of that fruitful musical period, Mudhoney, have crawled out of the sticky dirt to crank out a new album, 20 years after giving the world a grunge classic with Touch Me I’m Sick, and thankfully they have summoned the spirits of their scuzzy, raw, anthemic youth to make an album that is as relevant now as it would have been in the early 90s. It begins with the cocksure sexual swagger of I’m Now, a song many of the pubeless indie cretins of today’s ‘alternative indie rock’ bands would lop off their fringes and pointy-shoe-clad feet to have penned.

Inside Out Over You crackles with feedback and psychedelic twiddlings over a Jefferson Airplane-style bassline while the title track grooves along to a chorus of “The lucky ones are lucky they’re not around.” – a wry take on grunge’s casualties.

Other highlights are the blues-kissed What’s This Thing, the garage rock musings of And The Shimmering Light and the screaming teenage delight of Tales of Terror.

This gem was recorded in just three and a half days and the confident brevity of the uncomplicated songs would definitely corroborate this, with most of the tracks around the 3 minute mark. There is a lusty, noisy, filthy, punk vibe fused into every song – with a side order of garage, blues and The Stooges – and a sense of urgency that makes it difficult to believe these gents are on their 8th album and 20th year together. It filled this writer with joy to be aurally transported back to a time when Sonic Youth, Bleach, lumberjack shirts and Seattle were at the forefront of my mind and here’s hoping that Mudhoney bottle the energy they harnessed for this recording and churn out many more albums as enjoyable in the coming years. This is how it is done. Indie pretenders take note.